MUSIC

MUSIC; New York Rock's Hangover

By JON PARELES

Published: October 19, 2003

LIKE an all-night clubgoer emerging into the dawn's bleary light, the New York rock renaissance is on its way into a broader, less forgiving reality.

The Strokes and the Rapture, two New York City bands that have already been showered with praise, both release albums this month: the second album by the Strokes, ''Room on Fire,'' and the debut album by the Rapture, ''Echoes.'' (''Echoes'' was actually finished in June 2002 but was delayed a year by wrangles over songwriting credits and contracts.) Together, these albums sum up a moment in New York rock when promise collides with the limitations of a scene built on memories.

Since 2001, when the Strokes' debut album focused attention on a club scene bursting with good, ambitious bands, New York rock has had cachet to spare. From Williamsburg to the Lower East Side, bands have been reawakening jaded local audiences with rock that's true to New York's self-image: lean, smart and hard-nosed, with streaks of art and insolence.

Albums by the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Walkmen, the Liars, Oneida, the Ex Models, Enon and Animal Collective and the collection ''Yes New York'' proved that the music still sounds exhilarating offstage. But now comes the hard part. Every celebrated local scene has a half-life, from Detroit and Memphis in the 1960's to New York City and Athens, Ga., in the 1970's to Minneapolis in the 1980's to Seattle in the 1990's. To survive beyond the initial buzz, the music has to point someplace new.

Yet so far, the latest surge of New York rock has been more retro than revolutionary. Like all revivalists, these bands aren't just trying to reclaim an era. They're also trying to detour around what followed it: grunge, pop-punk, and mass-market hip-hop. Unlike even the crassest MTV rock pretenders, these bands don't want to absorb or acknowledge the music that has surrounded them for a generation.

Instead, they're savoring New York's last big moment: one that was aggressively contemporary and inclusive. It's a sonic souvenir from the turn of the 1980's, when New York was grittier and artier, and perhaps motives seemed purer. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, punks, artists, D.J.'s, disco fans, fashionmongers and early rappers all arrived at the same clubs.

For a few years, rockers and dancers mingled on dance floors and in bands, nurturing music that was both intelligent and visceral. They found it in post-punk New York bands like Talking Heads, the Contortions, Suicide, ESG and Richard Hell and the Voidoids; in other American bands like the Feelies, Pere Ubu, the B-52's and Devo; in English bands like Gang of Four, Joy Division, the Cure, the Fall, Siouxsie and the Banshees, XTC and Public Image Ltd. and in the German rock of bands like Can and Kraftwerk. All those bands are emulated in the latest New York rock.

What such disparate bands shared was an insistence on clarity, concision and rawness. Whether they were letting early synthesizers blip off-key or gnashing out guitar chords, the music was angular and unsweetened, with nothing to cushion its funk or noise. It was also highly organized, carefully timing its anarchic outbursts. The lucky bands had hits, and the others became objects of cult adoration that has simmered for 20 years while other styles ruled the pop mainstream (and still do). In New York City at the end of the 20th century, new bands coalesced around the old post-punk sounds.

The Strokes never pretended to be pioneers. The band arrived with no manifesto, just terse songs, and it sounded from the beginning like a compendium of ideas that should never have gone out of style.

Their 2001 debut album, ''Is This It?'' (RCA), had guitars and vocals out of the Velvet Underground, bass riffs from Iggy Pop and dollops of Talking Heads and the Feelies. The music stayed compact: the sound was compressed into the midrange, and the songs were under four minutes long. But Julian Casablancas's hoarse, distorted voice confessed to longings that sounded genuine, and the modest structures were intently focused and surreptitiously catchy. Throwback or not, the Strokes sounded like a long-awaited corrective: New York rock re-emerging, streamlined and decisive.

''Room on Fire'' (also on RCA) is more of the same: 11 songs in 33 minutes. Each one is a taut construction, setting the grain of the vocal against the austere clarity of the band: meshing and separating, working at cross purposes and then sharing a melody.

Mr. Casablancas can sum up a failing romance in a few one-syllable words -- ''I've got you to let me down'' -- or neatly sketch a polysexual demimonde: ''She wanted him, he wanted me.'' Lovers' quarrels fill most of the Strokes' new songs, but on this album, a few songs reminisce about youthful encounters. In ''12:51,'' as the singer visits a girl whose ''folks are away,'' the era is pinned down by a keyboard line out of the Cars.

The songs move at medium tempos but change constantly; they're handbooks of rock arranging. ''Reptilia'' starts with a basic drumbeat and one repeating bass note, flares into rhythm guitar chords, drops away so that a lone guitar jabs at Mr. Casablancas's voice, then swells urgently behind him as he demands, ''Please don't slow me down if I'm going too fast.''

All that's missing from ''Room on Fire'' is the debut album's element of surprise. But it's a crucial element. Now that the Strokes are a known quantity, ''Room on Fire'' sounds like a holding action.

While the Strokes recall the pared-down rock that grew out of punk, the Rapture prefers funk with rock barbs. The Rapture turns itself into something like an early-1980's dance-rock jukebox for ''Echoes'' (Universal/Strummer/DFA), putting a tough facade on confessions of yearning. The four-man band revolves around Luke Jenner's discordant rhythm-guitar slashes and his yelping, androgynous lead vocals, repeating lines like, ''Love is all my crippled soul will ever need.''

On ''Echoes,'' the Rapture flaunts its imitations: Public Image Ltd. in the title song, the Cure in ''Olio'' and Gang of Four in ''Heaven.'' (Its fellow New York bands Radio 4 and the Liars are also obvious Gang of Four fans.) But the band just about gets away with it because its grooves -- played by hand, not computers -- are so solid and the production (by James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy, the partners in DFA Records) is so abundantly detailed.

Abetted by its producers, the Rapture gets deep inside the old vamps. In ''House of Jealous Lovers,'' released last year as a single, Mr. Jenner's brusque guitar reverberates from ear to ear, Mattie Safer's bass pushes steadily and every tap by Vito Roccoforte on a cymbal or cowbell sounds three-dimensional. When Mr. Safer switches to keyboards in other songs, each piano note or cool electro beep shimmers. A few slower songs try to move the Rapture beyond the dance floor, but they're awkward; this is a band that was made to stomp while it shrieks.

Or maybe not. The Rapture has a different slow song, a wavery and convincing benediction called ''Silent Morning'' -- complete with vocal chorales, jingle bells and feedback -- on ''Compilation #1'' (DFA), a collection of singles produced by Mr. Murphy and Mr. Goldsworthy. And reversing the usual pop pattern, the singles are more adventurous than album tracks. The compilation reveals a fuller spectrum of DFA mischief than ''Echoes'' does: stereo squeaks with a beat from the improvisational group Black Dice, old-fashioned electro blips and clicks from the Juan Maclean and brisk dance grooves from Mr. Murphy's one-man studio band, LCD Soundsystem, letting him yowl like James Chance of the Contortions.

On one selection, ''Losing My Edge,' Mr. Murphy turns himself into a name-dropping hipster parody. He insists ''I was there'' at credential-conferring locales from Captain Beefheart's debut to the disc-jockey booth at the fondly remembered dance club, the Paradise Garage. Meanwhile, he admits that now, he's being overtaken by kids with ''borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80's.''

He's only half joking. As producer and recording act, Mr. Murphy is trading in exactly that nostalgia. The dissonant dance tracks he produces for himself and the Rapture are abrasive, but in time-tested ways. They're not challenging their current fans, only ratifying their record collections.

The retro tone of New York rock could be seen as strategic. After all, it took punk more than a decade to start its commercial ascent in the United States, and punks were only using three or four easy chords. Maybe the fractured asymmetries of post-punk needed a full 20 years to sink in, and now's the time to turn that familiarity into pop success. Perhaps the Rapture could be to dissonant funk what Green Day were to punk.

But New York rockers wouldn't dream of that kind of calculation, not in a city that has always prided itself on being in the vanguard. Two decades ago, it was. Post-punk set out to distort formulas, not to create new ones; it was music of quirks and collisions, not orthodoxies to be copied. The context for the music has also changed. Where post-punk knocked the stuffing out of plush commercial rock two decades ago, at least for its limited audiences, now it's competing with hip-hop and hard rock that can be just as choppy and atonal.

There's still hope for a New York rock that's as daring as it was when the new wave was new. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the city's other standard-bearer, don't pigeonhole themselves like the Strokes or the Rapture; they hop so many eras so manically that their own personality comes through. There are also lesser-known but vital groups like the Fiery Furnaces -- a brother-and-sister team who meld parlor piano, blues guitar, woozy analog synthesizers and free associations into a 21st-century New York skiffle -- or Oneida, which creates a frenetic tangle of patterned repetition and psychedelic noise. They're not recreating something after the fact; they're knocking together their own messy hybrids. ''Don't take away the precious wreck of chaos we are in,'' Oneida sings on its new album, ''Secret Wars'' (Jagjaguwar): watchwords, if we're lucky, for New York rock beyond revivalism.

Photos: Julian Casablancas of the Strokes singing in Philadelphia earlier this month. (Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)(pg. 1); At left, the Rapture (Luke Jenner, Vito Roccoforte, Gabe Andruzzi and Mattie Safer), and at left below, the Strokes (Albert Hammond Jr., Fabrizio Moretti, Nick Valensi, Julian Casablancas and Nikolai Fraiture). (Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times); (Photo by Brennan Cavanaugh)(pg. 24)